Sunday, August 15, 2004

The devil you don’t know: The unexpected future of Open Access publishing by Joseph J. Esposito
With the advent of the Internet and online publishing, the notion has arisen that access to the world’s research publications could be made available to one and all for free, presumably by shifting the costs to other places in the value chain and disintermediating publishers, a circumstance called Open Access (OA) publishing. While there are many hopes embedded in this view (lower costs, wider access, etc.), it appears more likely that Open Access will come about not through a revolution in the world of legacy publishing, but through upstart media built with the innate characteristics of the Internet in mind. An unanticipated outcome of this situation will be that the overall cost of research publications will rise, though the costs will be borne by different players, primarily authors and their proxies.

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By Diana Botluk
Diana Botluk, author of The Legal List: Research on the Internet, has written extensively about online legal research. Diana was named one of the top online legal researchers in T.R. Halvorson’s Law of the Super Searchers: The Online Secrets of Top Legal Researchers (CyberAge Books, 2000). With over 20 years of experience in online research, she has designed and delivered many special workshops and demonstrations in legal research and online resources for a variety of continuing legal education and continuing library education organizations. Diana earned her J.D. in 1984 from Catholic University Law School.